Violetta Silvera

Violetta Silvera was born in Milano January 7, 1924 to a family from Aleppo, who emigrated to Milan for work. Following the enactment of the racial laws in 1938, Violetta was forced to withdraw from the state run teachers college, which she was attending, and enrolled in the newly founded Jewish school in the Via Eupili. She and two of her classmates began working in a factory and enlisted in the civil service. She also wrote poems, “waiting poems” as her literature teacher called them. On December 3, 1943 Violetta and her parents were arrested in Porto Ceresio, by an Italian policeman, while attempting to escape to Switzerland. The only known information that remains, from the period of her arrest to her death, comes from the testimony of Liliana Segre, who was imprisoned with her, first in Varese and then in San Vittore. They were together on the morning of January 30, 1944, when more than 600 people were taken from the Milan prison, at the first light of dawn, put in vans and taken down to the lower level of Central Station to be deported to Auschwitz, in a convoy which arrived at the death camps seven days later. Violetta was immediately killed, in her mother’s arms, upon arrival.